Creatively Frustrated Seeks Same for Collaboration
An introvert’s quest for creative chemistry
I believe it was on the website of esteemed literary journal Brainyquote where Joan Didion once said, “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” Though maybe she was paraphrasing Flannery O’Connor, who herself noted in the annals of Goodreads.com, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”
Don’t quote me on it, though, because despite having all of the trappings of being well-versed in the female literary canon (prone to making wry observations, habitually saying goodbye to all that, drinking gin in the afternoons), I’m sorry to say that I haven’t actually read much of either author’s works.
Nevertheless, following the positive reception of my last post, wherein I publicly flogged myself for being bad at business on my first try, I’ve adopted their sentiment as my own. Some amazing things have whirred into motion as a result of pushing those thoughts out of my head and into the internet: I’ve launched a newsletter, begun consulting with a food startup accelerator, and am shaping plans to create my own food experience design practice. After writing it down, I know what I think now, and that is that my thoughts are ready to become actions.
Except for one little thing. I don’t think I can go it alone, and I don’t really want to.
The problem is that I’ve been spoiled by years as a member, leader, and builder of design teams. The energy that I derive from creative collaboration is a powerful magnetic force that consistently draws me back to joining a team every time I stray out on my own. Sure, cooking I can handle as a solo operative, I often even prefer it that way. But when it comes to problem solving, sense making, and idea building, I work better together.
It’s not for lack of starting points to approach these tasks. After so many years as a design practitioner, I’ve got a plentiful toolkit to draw upon. All manners of worksheets and experience maps, frameworks and blueprints. Many, many decks of method cards. All of these are really useful mechanisms for externalizing and organizing your thoughts. Sometimes what you really need though, is to just think out loud in a stream of consciousness, letting someone else sort through the haystack in your head in order to find a needle or two, with the latent understanding that you’ll do the same for them.
In that sense, the “work” of creative collaboration is not unlike a form of therapy, which is probably why it is simultaneously invigorating and exhausting. Accountability is also intrinsic to the arrangement, making sure you each show up, play to each other’s strengths and shore up the weak spots, and challenge each other’s logic when you get in the weeds.
Of course, there’s also the incessant talking, the compulsion to capture every shred of an obtuse idea on scraps of sticky paper, and the plastering of any available surface with these weird hieroglyphics only understood by their creators. So, ok, maybe I can understand how that’s not for everyone.
Remember when “The Tipping Point” came out and every resumé you received was for someone who considered themselves a “maven” of something? If you recall, the following decade then brought its own tipping point of ninjas and gurus breaking onto the scene. That aside, in a fit of nostalgia for social media’s salad days, I started thinking about Gladwell’s three archetypes: mavens, connectors, and salespeople.
The archetypes are sort of like a professional astrological sign, and according to my own highly presumptive reading, I’m a maven with connector rising, or something like that. I am also a Libra, in case you were wondering. Basically, I’m an ideas person, a thinker and a noodler who loves diving into information. Surprise, surprise. But I also exhibit significant connector tendencies — always matchmaking like-minded friends and colleagues to team up on projects or recruiting them to new opportunities.
You could say I’m a LinkedIn ninja.
Yet somehow I’m facing a conundrum. While my maven side is spinning up these new projects, my connector side is at a loss for how to put those matchmaking skills to work for myself. Outside of my current professional network, I’m not sure how to find new collaborators.
Over the years, I’ve been lucky to have struck creative chemistry gold a small handful of times. In my all-too-brief tenure as Head of Design for Capital One Labs, I managed to assemble a group of designers so talented, so bright, and so passionate that I will forever be in pursuit of conjuring that level of creative synergy — not to mention brainpower again.
And then there is, and will always be Ricardo, the yin to my yang, the Statler to my Waldorf, the Stan to my Peggy Olson- if Stan were a strikingly handsome gay man with a penchant for misanthropy and a passion for history, and if Peggy were a 40 year old cat lady with an edgy wardrobe of Acne Studios. No one has so keen an eye as Ricardo, nor the ability to pull my ideas out of the fog and fill them with light. It’s been too long since we’ve worked side-by-side, but our sentence-finishing mind-meld has never lost its strength.
So it seems a cruel irony that while I’m fortunate to spend my days surrounded by a really crack team of designers thinking, sketching, and yes, talking, all of this creative energy is being channeled toward improving other people’s ideas. I suppose it’s because other people’s ideas are paying the bills.
In those last innocent days of the early nineties, when the on-ramp to the information superhighway was still under construction, I subscribed to a newspaper that was published for regional New England high schoolers, The 21st Century. A budding young journalist, I was keen to read the work of my peers, and of course to submit my own. The real highlight, however, was the section of the paper dedicated to posting personal ads, ostensibly for the purpose of connecting pen pals (Can you even imagine!)
Down and out in the ‘burbs, I was ecstatic to find my people- punks and goths, artists and writers, wearers of Docs, admirers of Robert Smith, readers of Thoreau and Ginsberg. Actually, I still want to hang out with those people. Of course I posted my own ad, through which I developed epic correspondences and exchanged zines (obviously I wrote a zine) from all over the world. What a time to be alive!
If only it were that easy today. Well, maybe it is. I’ve joined Facebook groups, I keep getting alerts for new Meetups. Living in a major city like London, there’s no shortage of really promising networking events, like this one and this one, and this one. There, you’re sure to be swimming in a sea of supremely engaging like-mindeds. But as an introvert, it’s really just signing up for several gut-wrenching hours of navigating a roomful of strangers and trying to sidle up to a group when a gap is left by some enviably gregarious soul who floats off to join a more interesting conversation.
How is that we have platforms for connecting people one-on-one for jobs, for relationships, for travel, and for all sorts of sex, but not for creative collaboration? Am I sitting on a billion dollar startup here? I may just be.
In which case, I’ve got a great idea — think Tinder for creative projects — and I’m looking for collaborators. Must love contemporary literary fiction, Swedish fashion labels, the far superior music of the nineties, constantly talking about food, writing on Post-its, and cats. Call me!
